Damien Drew

Damien Drew is an Art Director and Production Designer whose feature film credits include Ridley Scott’s forthcoming Alien Covenant, The Great Gatsby, Superman Returns, Star Wars and The Matrix films. He studied Architecture at UNSW in Sydney and his passion for place making and visual story telling is clear and concise. With a humble nod to great documentary image-makers such as Jeff Brouws, Ed Ruscha and Walker Evans this is a personal moment in time.

Everywhere was Wherever

‘Everywhere was Wherever’ presents a series of images captured in an 18-day 6000 mile motorcycle trip across the USA. Drew’s singular experience has generated a unique perspective from the American road. Anonymous remnant facades replace the familiar and romantic portrayal of roadside Americana. Like locations for a yet to be made film, these lonely edifices sit incomplete yet interchangeable. Evidenced in these images is a search for both personal and geographical identity. Drew speaks of every intersection presenting a choice, yet every destination feeling the same. These buildings stand as witnesses to the transient and rootless. The road is a lonely place where almost everybody seems lost.

These images ask us to pay attention to scenes and details habitually passed over, presenting beauty in unlikely places. With the outward expansion and relentless franchising of roadside America there is a loss of place and texture. Drew notes the lament of America’s decent into ‘placelessness’ in Howard Kunstler’s ‘The Geography of Nowhere’. It is a country transformed from vital places and communities to a land where every place is no place in particular. In photographer Jeff Brouw’s monograph ‘Approaching Nowhere’ William L. Fox writes; “the vernacular was in peril. Everywhere was wherever and there is no escaping it”.

As part of his first solo show, Drew published ‘Everywhere was Wherever’ as an edition of 60 signed copies. He still has a few artist signed (un-editioned) copies available, which can be purchased here.